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Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on September 9, 2008
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2008 44(4):427-444; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqn059
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: The Fantastic: An Enduring Literary Mode [View the issue table of contents]

Marvellous Bodies? Strange Sex(es)? – Fantastic Genre in Recent French Fiction

Philippa Caine

School of Languages, Cultures and Religions
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4LA
United Kingdom

pcec1fr{at}yahoo.fr

  Abstract

Tzvetan Todorov's influential definition of the Fantastic genre insists on sustained hesitation between the uncanny and the marvellous, between the real and the illusory. This article considers this equivocal textuality in four recent French novels, which also have a characteristically "sexy" contemporary focus on corporeality. These novels are: Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes (1996), Vincent de Swarte's Elle est moi (2005), Sophie Jabès' Alice la saucisse (2003) and Claire Legendre's Viande (1999). The analysis exploits the polysemy of the term genre, referring both to literary mode and to (masculine/feminine) gender, to discuss the fantastical genre of/in these novels, whose protagonists' strange sexual transformations and troubling gender performances exaggerate, confuse and deconstruct fixed notions of gendered corpo-reality.

Key Words: corporeality • Darrieussecq, Marie • de Swarte, Vincent • fantastic • gender • Jabès, Sophie • Legendre, Claire • performativity • sex • Todorov, Tzvetan


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